Chapter 4: Partisan Causes

Teresa Heinz Kerry has in fact invested an enormous amount of tax-exempt grant money in “a laundry list of partisan causes and fringe political groups.” The grants speak for themselves.

ACLU: The Legal Left after 9/11

For many years, no association has been so identified with the public image of the left as the ACLU. While Teresa Heinz Kerry served as a Carnegie trustee in 2000, that body donated $300,000 to the ACLU Foundation. Since 9/11, the ACLU has crusaded in behalf of al-Qaeda detainees, hindered investigations of suspected terrorists, sowed hysteria about the Patriot Act and smeared Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Justice Department as a foe of the Constitution.

According to the ACLU the Patriot Act authorizes a radical expansion of federal wiretapping and investigative powers. A typical ACLU press release reads, “Under the new Ashcroft guidelines, the FBI can freely infiltrate mosques, churches and synagogues and other houses of worship, listen in on online chat rooms and read message boards even if it has no evidence that a crime might be committed.” However, these guidelines are not “new”; these powers were granted in 1978 by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The Patriot Act merely allows federal agents to use these investigative tools on terrorists as they have for decades on the Mafia – preventing rather than waiting for an imminent terrorist attack. Terrorism wiretaps must be approved in court, just like those in a criminal investigation. In short the ACLU’s civil liberties zeal seems to be related to the perceived “victims”: terrorists. Ordinary criminals inspired no comparable crusade.

In the post-9/11 period, the ACLU has ruthlessly sued any airline taking extra security steps which caused inconvenience to Muslims, who are responsible for 100 percent of the terrorist incidents since (and including) the attack on the World Trade Center. To the ACLU, a sharpened focus on a group from which all post-9/11 terrorists have been recruited is “racial profiling.”[1]

The ACLU also opposes the government’s policy requiring some “temporary visa” holders to register with Immigration Services or face deportation. This policy was drafted to affect only males between the ages of 16 and 25 from nations with known ties to terrorism. Since the government did not equally inconvenience every temporary visa holder in the country (which would be beyond its resources), the ACLU has declared the policy “discrimination,” offering legal advice to those affected, organizing protests on their behalf, and harassing government agencies through legal complaints.

The ACLU has leaped to the defense of many terrorists including Sami al-Arian, the indicted chief financier and co-founder of the Palestine Islamic Jihad, responsible for the suicide bombing murders of more than 100 individuals including two American citizens. Professor al-Arian ran the University of South Florida’s International Institute of Islamic Thought, where he hired fellow terrorists as “assistants,” all the while directing money to PIJ terrorists. The ACLU has since sought to interfere with the government’s investigation of the International Institute of Islamic Thought, questioning the scope of federal search warrants. The lawyers even jumped to al-Arian’s defense when he told them his jailers only let him change his underwear once a week. In this denial of a prisoner’s inalienable right to fresh skivvies, the ACLU smells “the disgusting raw exercise of power by John Ashcroft.” The prison denies any wrongdoing, but this has not kept the ACLU from repeating al-Arian’s charges.[2]

The Heinz grant did not go directly to this particular ACLU effort. It was earmarked for the ACLU’s “voting rights project.” But by funding another of the ACLU’s projects, Carnegie frees up the ACLU’s own funds for programs like this. On the other hand, the voting rights project itself supports three agendas most Americans might find offensive: stifling democracy, race-based politics, and bigger government.[3] For example, the “voting rights” project supported the creation of an all-Indian voting district in Montana, because, in the Orwellian wording of its press release, “even though both Rosebud and Lake counties include substantial voting blocs of Indians…their votes are diluted by the white majority.”[4]

Here the ACLU is following the jurisprudence of quota maven Lani Guinier, the Harvard professor Bill Clinton unsuccessfully nominated to head his Civil Rights Division in 1993. Guinier believes that not only should minorities have their own congressional districts, but they should retain veto power over any bill passed by a majority of Americans to which they object. This would lead to the Balkanization of the American polity along race lines, which is exactly what the divisive left wants. As a by-product of focusing voters on narrowly racial political interests, this proposed reform would help assure the targeted districts would represented by Democrats. (For some reason, these ACLU lawsuits only get filed for heavily Democratic constituencies.)

The ACLU voting rights project also proposes “full public [that is, taxpayer] financing for federal elections.”[5] Putting the money for elections in the hands of the majority political party (which is what this in effect would achieve) is a prescription for ending democracy, not improving it. Thomas Jefferson once said, “To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” That nicely summarizes the ACLU proposal.

The ACLU has engaged in a series of controversial court cases questioning most aspects of the president’s Homeland Security policy, litigating for terror suspects, supporting racial preferences and defending the North American Man-Boy Love Association, which promotes sex between adults and “consenting” children.

Undermining Homeland Security via the Open Borders Lobby

Teresa Heinz Kerry’s charities have steered well over half-a-million dollars to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), one of the premier organizations making up the “open borders” lobby. Carnegie supplied MALDEF with $750,000 in 2000 alone; the Heinz Endowments have also given unrestricted money to MALDEF. MALDEF used this cash in a prolonged effort to erase America’s borders and undermine the nation’s security.

When founded in 1966, MALDEF acted as a public interest law firm looking after the legitimate interests of Mexican-Americans immigrants who had become citizens. However, after a recommendation from the NAACP-Legal Defense and Education Fund, officials at the Ford Foundation met with MALDEF head Peter Tijerina, and gave the tiny organization $2.2 million. Over the ensuing three decades, Ford funded MALDEF with more than $30 million. For twenty years it was for all intents and purposes the sole funder of MALDEF. It used is leverage to transform the organization, moving its headquarters from San Antonio to San Francisco and radicalizing its political agendas.

It was MALDEF, with help from San Francisco’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, that neutered California’s popular Proposition 187, which denied non-emergency governmentservices to illegal immigrants. MALDEF also encouraged state governments to accept Mexico’s nearly worthless matrícula ID cards. These cards, which are notoriously easy to forge, are now used as the equivalent of a driver’s license in establishing identities for illegal aliens. MALDEF is working to see even these matrícula cards are freely given to illegal immigrants (not all of whom are of Hispanic extraction), with all the privileges they accord.

Not content with second-rate IDs, the Ford-managed legal group sued the state of Georgia“to expand access to driver’s licenses without regard to immigration status” and succeeded in getting California’s outgoing governor, Gray Davis, to approve a similar policy. Thus, illegal immigrants were given an extra tool to avoid police detection.[6] The possibility that these will help provide cover for Islamist aliens is real and disturbing – but not to MALDEF or Kerry.

Mrs. Kerry is so untroubled by this activism she has underwritten, through the Heinz Family Foundation, the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA). The funds specifically went to the 2001 “Give Liberty a Hand” Awards program in a token gesture of support for MIRA’s agenda. Subsequent winners of the award include Rep. Barney Frank, for his pro-immigrant stance.[7]

MIRA is also engaged in undercutting Homeland Security. The year the grant was awarded, MIRA called the Patriot Act “very troubling.”[8] In June 2002, MIRA explicitly told its followers not to comply with federal immigration law:

Please do NOT aid people in applying with INS unless you are familiar with their immigration history and are certain they would not be at risk of deportation by doing so. Always refer clients to an attorney if they are out of status or have a criminal record of any kind.It is very important that we, as service providers, do not put people at risk even as we try to help them.[9] (Emphasis in original.)

Immediately after 9/11 a MIRA press release asked people to “Refer local Arab, Muslim, and affected groups to MIRA.”[10]

MIRA advocates that illegals should be allowed to receive in-state tuition discounts at state universities.[11] The DREAM Act legislation, which MIRA favors would encourage this. MIRA fumes, “President Bush has done nothing to help its passage, in essence, squelching the dreams of immigrant youth throughout the country.”[12]

Teresa Heinz Kerry also oversaw the funding of another Open Borders/anti-Homeland Security group, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc. (CLINIC), distributing a $25,000 grant from Carnegie in 2000 to be used for legal issues regarding immigrants. When the grant was awarded, CLINIC had been defending those detained by the INS. After 9/11, this would take on an entirely new significance. CLINIC continues to represent detainees, now not Mexicans but Islamist radicals suspected of plotting terrorism. It has also launched a media effort to criticize the allegedly “devastating track record on the treatment of immigrants in INS custody.” CLINIC promises, “The immigration policies resulting from September 11th will certainly represent an area of high priority in CLINIC's media work.” Elsewhere, this pillar of the Religious Left works to assure that illegal immigrants – which it describes only as “immigrant laborers” –receive the equal legal protection of labor provided by U.S. law, the same law these illegals broke when entering the country in the first place. It appears CLINIC also hopes to provide illegals the right to vote. CLINIC’s National Immigrant Empowerment Project says it hopes to help immigrants increase “civic participation” – and CLINIC, like the liberal U.S. Catholic Bishops, makes no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. “Approved projects,” CLINIC says, “have sought to empower immigrants around issues of labor, housing, education, crime reduction, municipal services, immigration, health care and state and federal laws.”[13] (Emphasis added.)

In 1999, Teresa Heinz Kerry allocated $450,000, through Carnegie, to the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund’s general fund. According to its introductory booklet, the Defense and Education Fund has filed motions supporting racial preferences and eroding the government’s ability to act only in English.[14] The booklet spells out more PRLDEF causes:

From bringing cases on redistricting in a number of states, to representing the people of Vieques, Puerto Rico in their fight to have the U.S. Navy stop bombing practices on their island; from protecting the labor rights of undocumented Mexican workers to fair wages and treatment on the job, to bringing lawsuits against public universities to assure their access to Latino immigrants, the Fund’s Legal Division continues to fight the good fight.[15]

The Howard Heinz Endowment in 2001 similarly donated $200,000 to Pittsburgh’s El Hispano Centro/The Hispanic Center Inc. “to support recruitment and employment services in the Hispanic community.” The Hispanic Center’s focus is to serve “recently arrived families,” attracting new immigrants (legal or illegal) to the Pittsburgh area. The first item listed under “main areas in which The Center can be of assistance” is “Legal, for problems related to immigration.”[16]Its “Family Reunification Plan” assists Hispanics who want to bring their relatives into the United States.[17] El Hispano Centro is affiliated with ACORN, a grassroots socialist organization formed by New Left radicals.[18]

Islamic Indoctrination

Over a five-year period, the Heinz Endowments have given $700,000 to the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh. The Council has created a social studies curriculum for area schoolteachers that blames America country for 9/11 – and even names Osama bin Laden as one of the key forces that will bring an end to America’s superpower status. A handout in the Council’s lesson plan on “American primacy” tells students America’s days as a superpower are coming to a close – and specifically names Osama bin Laden as our replacement. Students may not see our inevitable slide into obscurity, but:

the long-term trend is unmistakable. Other nations are rising, and non-state actors – ranging from Usama bin Laden to Amnesty International to the International Criminal Court – are increasing in number and acquiring power.[19]

That’s an interesting juxtaposition of organizations: Amnesty International, the World Court and al-Qaeda.

These words, written before September 11th, would have been outrageous at the time. That the local World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh developed them powered by large grants from Teresa Heinz Kerry, and continue to feature them on the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh’s website and in their programmatic efforts three years after the attack on the World Trade Center is more than troubling.[20]

Another curriculum of the Council is its set of lesson plans on weapons of mass destruction. One student handout informs youngsters that, “American intervention in troubled areas is not so much a way to fend off [foreign/terrorist] threats as it is what stirs them up.” Moreover, “It is hardly likely that Middle Eastern radicals would be hatching schemes like the destruction of the World Trade Center if it had not been identified for so long as the mainstay of Israel…Playing Globocop feeds the urge of aggrieved groups to strike back.”[21] The curriculum offered no alternative views to students.

A handout in the 1999 series blames the spread of Islamic fundamentalism on the West. “European women have invaded Tunisia’s sparkling beaches, parading in topless swimsuits and stimulating a brisk trade in alcohol and prostitution,” children are taught. “That’s why Tunisian women and their husbands are embracing Islamic fundamentalism.”[22] Suicide bombing of innocents? Beheading of captives? Caucasian breasts made them do it.

Another handout from the same year includes the English translation of the Islamic declaration of faith, with a transliteration in Arabic. The handout does not inform its recipients that from a Muslim standpoint, if one pronounces this prayer aloud in its entirety in any language, one has converted to Islam.[23]

The World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh generally produces material uncritical about Islam and ferociously slanted against the secular, Judeo-Christian and democratic West. In January 2002, as the nation debated going into Iraq, the Council mailed a series of glossaries to teachers for use in their classrooms. The first defined the words “distort,” “hearsay,” “propaganda,” “assume,” “insinuate,” “assert,” “speculate,” and finally “fact.” A second defines “ethnocentrism,” “prejudice,” “racism,” “stereotyping,” and “xenophobia.”

The teachers “resource” lists a number of websites educators should consult for further information. Among these are the aforementioned CAIR, the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Council on Islamic Education, the Middle East Policy Council, and Arab World And Islamic Resources.[24]

Dr. John Esposito, former head of the Middle East Studies Association who also advised the Clinton State Department, operates the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. Esposito may be the most influential academic in the area of Middle Eastern Studies. In early 2001, Esposito claimed American officials were too worried about Osama bin Laden. “Focusing on Osama bin Laden risks catapulting one of the many sources of terrorism to center stage, distorting both the diverse international sources and the relevance of one man.”

This is not the only terrorist threat he missed or dismissed. When University of South Florida President Judy Genshaft fired terrorist Sami al-Arian, Esposito wrote her a letter on al-Arian’s behalf. In it, he stated he was “stunned, astonished and saddened” at his friend’s dismissal, as he had known al-Arian to be “a consummate professional.” Esposito excused the charges against al-Arian by noting he “and his family are Palestinians. They have suffered and feel deeply about Palestine and the plight of the Palestinians.”[25]

In keeping with this theme, Esposito once said Hamas – the largest terrorist army in the world – is not in fact organized around terrorism so much as “honey, cheese-making, and home-based clothing manufacture.” He told an NPR interviewer that Yasser Arafat’s calls to “jihad” simply indicate performing good social actions, like starting a “literacy campaign” or joining the “fight against AIDS.”[26]

Esposito is not the only individual at the Center to provide the media with misinformation on Islamists. When fundamentalist Muslim terrorists began decapitating Americans in Iraq, Esposito’s fellow professor Yvonne Haddad told New York Newsday, “There is absolutely nothing in Islam that justifies cutting off a person's head.” Yet the Koran itself refers to this practice:

God revealed His will to the angels, saying: “I shall be with you. Give courage to the believers. I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads, strike off the very tips of their fingers.” (Sura 8, Verse 12)

“When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield strike off their heads.” (Sura 47, Verse 4)[27]

This practice was taught “by all four classical schools of Islamic jurisprudence, across the vast Muslim empire.” Far from unique, the “infidel” population of Muslim Spain often met the same fate as twenty-first century American Nicholas Berg.[28]

The Council on Islamic Education produced the tome Across the Centuries, which presents the major events of Mohammed’s life as fact rather than theology. It notes, for instance, “Jerusalem is where Jesus was crucified and buried, and it was where Muhammad rose to heaven.” (But not, apparently where Jesus was resurrected or Solomon built his Temple.) The history skews heavily toward Muslim society. For instance, the European Middle Ages receive seven pages in the book; the “Village Society in West Africa” gets eight.[29] In a class exercise, students are informed, “You and your classmates will become Muslims” and are then told to recite the prayer, “Praise be to Allah, Lord of Creation.”

This is not the first time the Middle East Policy Council and Arab World And Islamic Resources have been paired together. The two worked together in 1999 to produce Arab World Studies Notebook. The Middle East Policy Council printed the 540-page teachers guide, which was written by Arab World and Islamic Resources Executive Director Audrey Park Shabbas. This classroom tool claims Muslims discovered America before Columbus and intermarried with Alogonquin Indians, later rising to the level of chief.[30] This is the stuff of fantasy.

The supplement the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh issued the following September is likewise flawed.[31] The online guide links to the PBS/Frontline “Roots of Terrorism” teachers guide. The browser is immediately greeted on the website by a picture of Muslim protesters holding an enormous billboard reading, “Americans Think! Why You Are Hated All Over The World.”[32] (Emphasis in original.)

“Bring Najaf to New York”

Teresa Heinz Kerry’s dollars have also flowed freely to the propaganda organs of the far-left. Chief among these is the Independent Media Institute, based in San Francisco, which accepted a $24,500 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York in the year 2000, while Teresa was still a trustee. The grant was issued “for a media strategy on campaign finance issues at state level.” The Independent Media Institute also receives significant financial backing from the Open Society Institute (George Soros), the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy (Bill Moyers), the Tides Foundation, and Working Assets.[33] IMI is the parent of AlterNet.org, its “progressive” syndication service. The group is currently screening the anti-Fox News “documentary” Outfoxed throughout the San Francisco Bay area.[34]

AlterNet encouraged riots at the 2004 RNC. Reproducing a Naomi Klein story from The Nation, AlterNet headlined her article, “Bring Najaf to New York” (Najaf is an Iraq city stronghold of the terrorist forces). AlterNet advanced her view that the current political climate “means there is only one chance for Americans to express their wholehearted rejection of the ongoing war on Iraq: in the streets outside the Republican National Convention. It's time to bring Najaf to New York.”[35] The site also was home to an exclusive piece by Sixties radical and Communist collaborator Tom Hayden, in which he encouraged RNC protests akin to those he led in 1968, which brought down the presidential campaign of anti-Communist liberal Hubert Humphrey.[36]

Bridging the worlds of anarchy and paranoia, Independent Media Institute’s project has not-so-subtly accused the Bush administration of murdering its comrades. In a column distributed by AlterNet, Dr. Michael I. Niman lists a half-dozen politicians who died in supposedly mysterious plane accidents (including Senator John Heinz), then intimates all may have been murdered – and that President George W. Bush might even have had Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone assassinated. Writes Niman:

Anyone familiar with my work knows that I’m certainly not a conspiracy theorist. But to be honest, I know I wasn’t alone in my initial reaction at this week’s horrible and tragic news: that being my surprise that Wellstone had lived this long…There is no indication today that Wellstone's death was the result of foul play. What we do know, however, is that Wellstone emerged as the most visible obstacle standing in the way of a draconian political agenda by an unelected government. And now he is conveniently gone. For our government to maintain its credibility at this time, we need an open and accountable independent investigation involving international participation into the death of Paul Wellstone. Hopefully we will find out, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that this was indeed an untimely accident. For the sake of our country, we need to know this.[37]

Reading that statement, blogger Andrew Sullivan asked, “Should the UN be called in to investigate whether the president of the United States ordered a hit job on a leading senator? This is looney tunes.”[38] Perhaps. But thanks to Teresa Heinz Kerry’s generosity, the insinuation is remarkably well funded.

So, too, is the Proteus Fund, the object of a $325,000 Carnegie grant in 2000 aimed at “strengthening…the Piper Fund.” The Piper Fund, too, promotes campaign finance reform. This program is heavily financed by Tides, the Ford Foundation, Bill Moyers’ Schumann Foundations, Working Assets, and George Soros’ Open Society Institute.[39] Soros, of course, is the financial power behind such Democratic 527 groups (so named because of their tax status) as MoveOn.org and Americans Coming Together. Soros, who has called defeating George W. Bush in 2004 “the central focus of my life,” has pledged $10 million of his own riches to that effort. The irony in having a wholly owned subsidiary of Soros, Moyers and Kerry inveigh against the corruption of the Almighty Dollar should be obvious.

However, campaign finance reform is far from Proteus’ only agenda. Its “Colombe Foundation” is a major antiwar protester/funder that seeks to “shift from wasteful military spending to investments in programs addressing poverty, environmental degradation and other root causes of violence.”[40] Those receiving money from the Colombe Foundation include United for Peace and Justice, the Tides Center’s September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, another Tides Center project, Mother Jones, Nation, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Union of Concerned Scientists, Institute for Policy Studies, and the left-wing talk show Democracy Now![41]

Another media endeavor receiving Bill Moyers, Ford Foundation and Teresa Heinz Kerry’s money is the The American Prospect, a magazine funded by Bill Moyers to provide a voice for the Democratic Party left. TAP received $132,000 from the Carnegie Corporation in 2000.It was a $5.5 million grant from Bill Moyers’ Florence and John Schumann Foundation in 1999 that transformed TAP from an academic journal to a biweekly newsstand publication meant to shape the future of the Democratic Party. Moyers also sits on the board of George Soros’ Open Society Institute.[42]

Editor-at-Large of The American Prospect is Harold Meyerson, Vice-Chair of the Democratic Socialists of America and a veteran radical leftist. One day after 9/11, Meyerson wrote, “even with Tuesday’s attack, our defense budget is still indefensibly high.” An avatar of the hate Bush movement, he described him as “The Most Dangerous President Ever,” saying he most closely resembles Confederate President Jefferson Davis.[43]The subject Carnegie underwrote? “A series of articles and a special issue focused on electoral and campaign finance reform.”

Unilateral Disarmament

Carnegie provided a half-million-dollar grant to the Center for Defense Information in 1999 for “institutional and program development.” Retired Rear Admiral Gene R. La Rocque founded the Center in 1972. In addition to its activities as a think tank, it also produces “America’s Defense Monitor,” which airs on many PBS affiliates. Throughout the Cold War, the Center for Defense Information took a radical position on disarmament. In 1983, La Rocque went on Soviet television to declare President Ronald Reagan “is not serious about arms control,” a move some thought crossed the line of responsible criticism. Washington Times national security reporter Bill Gertz has commented that spokesmen for the Center, “often reflect the Soviet position on so many things.” One episode of “America’s Defense Monitor,” aired at the height of the Cold War, quoted Marian Wright Edelman’s assertion, “For each missile we cancel, we could eliminate poverty for a year in 92,000 families headed by females. If we cancelled the whole program, we could eliminate poverty for all children in the U.S. twice over and have enough left to send all female heads of low-income families to college for a year!” On these grounds, the Center for Defense Information proposed deep cuts in military spending.[44]

The Center for Defense Information has not been absent from the War on Terror; far from it. The Center’s Distinguished Military Fellow General Anthony Zinni has made many headlines. In his book Battle Ready, Zinni wrote, “In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption.” On national television, he intimated that “neo-conservatives” (all those he named were Jewish) went to war to secure the position of Israel in the Middle East.[45]

Physicians on the Left

As part of the philanthropic anti-anti-terror war, the Heinz Endowments made two separate, unrestricted grants within three years to Physicians for Social Responsibility, a holdover group of the Sixties disarmament left. Physicians for Social Responsibility, which led the domestic campaign for the United States to unilaterally end nuclear testing during the Cold War (a major goal of the Soviets), has turned its sights on the War on Terrorism.

In addition to actively taking part in the antiwar (and often anti-American) rallies before, during and after Operation Iraqi Freedom, PSR has endorsed Democratic Rep. Lynne Woolsey’s “SMART Security plan.” Aside from asking for a UN permission slip to deploy American troops, the most important plank in the SMART program is increasing “funding for humanitarian programs, which address the root causes of instability and terrorism, like hunger, illiteracy and unemployment.” This is only slightly more important than supporting “institutions that can bring terrorists to justice, like the International Criminal Court.” The Physicians for Social Responsibility pamphlet fleshes out these proposals. It warns, “the Bush administration’s go-it-alone reliance on military response is doing more harm than good…It’s time we reject the role of go-it-alone policeman of the world.” (Emphasis in original).Then it lays out the most important element of Physicians for Social Responsibility’s prescription to end the threat of Islamofascist terror: “America needs to invest more at home – on health care for all Americans, rebuilding our schools and education system, creating jobs, and stopping pollution of our air, land and water.”[46] (Emphasis in original.)

Sure, that’ll stop al-Qaeda. The International Criminal Court is more likely to indict Henry Kissinger than Osama bin Laden, to bring American GIs to their knees than terrorist cells to justice.

Physicians for Social Responsibility founder Helen Caldicott – notorious for her anti-American, pro-Soviet views – contributed a chapter to the book Metal of Dishonor, an anti-nuclear tract published by the International Action Center, Ramsey Clark’s front group for the pro-Milosevic, pro-Kim Jong Il, Workers World Party. Clark, who also contributed a chapter to the book, has most recently volunteered his services to act as Saddam Hussein’s legal counsel.[47] The PSR opposed the UN’s economic sanctions against Iraq. “Killing children is not a foreign policy,” declaimed Evan Kanter, President of Washington state’s PSR implying that the sanctions supported by the United States were starving Iraqi children (precisely Saddam’s official propaganda line). In fact, the United States had supported the Oil for Food Program which was designed to provide $50 billion a year to feed Iraq’s children, but whose good intentions were thwarted by corrupt UN officials working in collusion with Saddam Hussein.[48]

Still fighting the disarmament fight, Physicians for Social Responsibility urges its members to contact Congress and oppose purchasing any new nuclear weapons. Its form letter to Congress scolds, “These programs send a clear ‘do as I say, not as I do’ message to the rest of the world and threaten to undermine the nation’s attempts to stem the world’s appetite for weapons of mass destruction.”[49]

Physicians for Social Responsibility has teamed up with the Center for Defense Information to host forums on nuclear disarmament as recently as last year.[50] Rep. Jim McDermott held a reception after that forum. The year before, on the even of war, Democratic Congressmen McDermott, David Bonior and Mike Thompson visited Baghdad, where McDermott declared, “I think the president would mislead the American people.”[51]After Saddam was captured in December of 2003, McDermott told a Seattle radio station that the military triumph was staged, and U.S. servicemen could have gotten the despot “a long time ago if they wanted.”[52]Teresa Heinz Kerry helped underwrite Physicians for Social Responsibility’s efforts to make McDermott into a hero.

The Feminist Left

The Heinz Family Foundation bestowed $2,000 upon the National Women’s Political Caucus “for general operating support.” The National Women’s Political Caucus opposes the Partial Birth Abortion ban (favored by as many as 90 percent of Americans) and takes a hard line against confirming President Bush’s long-filibustered judicial appointees. The Caucus also opposes Ward Connerly’s initiatives to make the nation’s laws colorblind – the original goal of the civil rights movement.[53] The Caucus endorses only women candidates, and only left-wing women candidates, including Patty Murray, Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, Lynne Woolsey and Zoe Lofgren.[54]

U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-WA, compared the United States with Osama bin Laden in front of a room of high school honors students – to Osama’s favor:

He's been out in these countries for decades building roads, building schools, building day-care facilities, building health care facilities. . . We have not done that. We haven't been out in many of these countries helping them build infrastructure. How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?[55]

Rep. Barbara Lee, D-CA, is a former runner for the Black Panther Party, and former aide to radical Berkeley Congressman Ron Dellums. Lee cast the lone vote against authorizing President Bush to fight al-Qaeda. Speaking on the House floor three days after the al-Qaeda terrorists claimed thousands of American lives, Lee feared President Bush really wanted to “embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.” She had previously cast the lone vote against a resolution expressing benign support of the troops already fighting (to save Albanian Muslims) in Serbia.

Lee learned her radicalism at the feet of her mentor, Ron Dellums. She served nine years in his office, ultimately rising to the position of Chief-of-Staff. In 1983, Lee conducted a “fact-finding” mission to the pro-Soviet regime of Grenada, later submitting a “report” to Congress personally doctored (at her invitation) by Grenada’s Marxist dictator. A letter written by another Dellums staffer to that dictator – discovered during the liberation of the island by U.S. troops – revealed that besides this Grenada strongman, “The only other person that I know of that [Dellums] expresses such admiration for is Fidel [Castro].” Lee’s own admiration for the Cuban dictator manifested itself shortly after her election to Congress in 1998, when she led a delegation to Cuba. She capped off the journey by calling on President Clinton to end the U.S. boycott of Cuba. Apparently, she could not bring herself to support U.S. servicemen currently in action in Serbia and cannot support striking a terrorist network’s key sponsor-state in self-defense, but she feels compassion for a sadistic Communist dictator.

Maxine Waters, D-CA, has a long history of racialist agitation to her credit. Waters has accused the CIA of selling crack in black neighborhoods during the 1980s, even though the San Jose Mercury-News retracted the story on which she based her allegations for lack of evidence. She defended the racial hatred that led a gang of black hoodlums to nearly murder white truck driver Reginald Denny during the 1992 L.A. Riots, saying, “the anger in my district is… righteous…I’m just as angry as they are.”[56] In September of 1998, Waters wrote a letter of apology to Castro after she had voted in favor of a bill calling on him to turn over former Black Panther Joanne Chesimard. Convicted 25 years earlier of murdering a New Jersey state trooper, she escaped from prison and received refugee status in Havana. While there, she took on a new name which Waters failed to recognize. When Waters learned the woman she’d voted to extradite was a Black Panther murderer, she urged Castro to continue safeguarding Chesimard, because she had been “persecuted for her civil-rights work.”[57]

During the War on Terror, Waters complained that suspected terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay “could not get bail.”[58] On the left-wing radio program “Democracy Now!” she referred to Operation Iraqi Freedom as a “coup d'etat” and stated, “Now we find that we are violating the prisoners. We're treating them worse than so-called Saddam had treated them.”[59] (Emphasis added.)

Rep. Lynne Woolsey, D-CA, helped draw up the “SMART Security” plan endorsed by Physicians for Social Responsibility. Woolsey condemned our “unnecessary and unjustified war in Iraq” She declared, “This war has not made us safer, but has squandered scarce resources, has cut short the lives of over 900 American service members, and has dangerously undermined our credibility throughout the world.”[60] She even blamed Saddam Hussein’s murderous intransigence on America’s reluctance to ratify the Kyoto Treaty:

President Bush has sent a message of his own by backing out of the ABM Treaty, refusing to sign the Kyoto treaty, refusing to be a party to the Mine Ban Treaty, withdrawing the U.S. signature to the International Criminal Court, failing to pay off our immense debt to the United Nations, and embracing the use of mini-nukes. Is it any wonder that other nations are not flocking to our side when we ignore the same international standards that we accuse Saddam Hussein of disregarding?[61]

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-CA, last made headlines when a former staffer was arrested for acting as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein and attempted espionage.

Racial Agitators

A generous portion of Heinz-controlled charity has gone to radical minority groups. Some claim the Republican Party “disenfranchised” black voters in 2000, others file suit to keep state governments from breaking up gerrymandered minority voting districts, some wish to give convicted felons the right to vote on the assumption that criminals are “political prisoners” and will vote for Democrats. All work against a racially harmonious society.

Some of the Heinz grants have gone to honor black Marxists. One such grant in 2001 went to honor singe and political activist Harry Belafonte. Historian and former New Leftist Ronald Radosh has described some of Belafonte’s political causes:

·“In June 2000, Belafonte was a featured speaker at a rally in Castro’s Cuba, honoring the American Soviet spies, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Tears, one observer reported, ‘streaked down’ Belafonte’s face, ‘as he recalled the pain and humiliation his friend [Paul] Robeson had been forced to endure’ in 1950s America. Undoubtedly, he was pleased to hear Cuba presented ‘as an example of keeping the principles the Rosenbergs fought and died for.’

·“In 1997, Belafonte was featured speaker at the 60th Anniversary celebration of the ‘Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,’ at which he honored these self-proclaimed ‘premature anti-fascists’ who served in the mid-1930s as Stalin's private Comintern army, a battalion (not a brigade) that served as enforcers of Soviet policy during the Spanish Civil War. To Belafonte, nothing had changed since the 1930s. The Lincoln Brigade vets were still representatives of ‘a truth that engulfed the universe . . . that fascism anywhere is a threat to people everywhere.’

·“Speaking in October 1983 at a ‘World Peace Concert’ run by East Germany's official Communist youth organization, Belafonte gave his blessings to the Soviet-sponsored ‘peace’ campaign pushing unilateral Western disarmament, at a time when the Soviets were putting SS-20 missiles in East Germany.

·“As The New York Times reported, Belafonte ‘attacked the American invasion of Grenada and also criticized the scheduled NATO weapons deployment’ of Pershing 2 missiles in West Germany…deployed to offset the Soviet missile offensive.”[62]

Shortly after this, Belafonte savagely attacked Colin Powell as a house “slave” of the Bush administration and blocked Condoleeza Rice from speaking at a fundraising dinner for Africare, another organization set to honor him. Most believe Dr. Rice, whose life has been dedicated to fighting first the Soviet menace and then that of Islamofascists, is more worthy of praise than a man who still weeps for American spies.

In early 2001, before Teresa Heinz Kerry left Carnegie’s board, Carnegie gave $400,000 to the general fund of the National Voting Rights Institute. The National Voting Rights Institute describes itself as “a prominent non-partisan legal center in the campaign finance reform field,” presenting campaign finance reform as a “civil rights issue.”[63] It likewise filed legal suit in Massachusetts after state redistricting broke up a formerly racially gerrymandered Latino district.[64] The Heinz Family Foundation also contributed $25,000 to the Idaho Hispanic Caucus “for Latino Vote 2002.” In 2001, IHC asked the Idaho chapter of the ACLU to oppose breaking up similar, racially rigged Congressional districts.[65]

In 2000, the Carnegie Corporation conferred $500,000 on the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law for general “support.” The Lawyers Committee’s main effort has been assisting the lawsuit NAACP v. Harris against the state of Florida “to address the disproportionate disenfranchisement of black Florida voters on election day.” Of course, testimony has since disclosed those voters turned away 1) were never registered to vote; 2) were no longer registered to vote; or 3) were convicted felons who lost their right to vote under state law. “Felon disenfranchisement” greatly concerns the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. Its website reveals it “filed an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals challenging Washington state’s felon disenfranchisement law as a violation of the Voting Rights Act.”[66] Washington state law – shared by many other states – decrees that convicted felons lose their right to vote. Using the same tortured logic Peggy Sheppard employs in her “environmental racism” cases, the Lawyers Committee claims that since this law disproportionately affects blacks, it is ipso facto racist.

In this effort, they are joined the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund (which received a comparable amount of Carnegie money in recent years, as well as a modest donation from the Heinz Endowments), People for the American Way, the ACLU and the Advancement Project.[67] In fact, the NAACP-LDEF has made this “racist” disenfranchisement one of its top five goals.[68] This despite the fact that these laws, based upon similar statutes from the Roman Empire, were originally adopted during the colonial era, before black citizens even had the right to vote.[69] Naturally, both the NAACP-LDEF and LCCRUL favor Congressional districts based on race, as well.[70]

Reparations

Heinz Kerry, through her connection to Carnegie, has financed groups of varying ethnicities that all share the same racialist political agenda. The Native American Rights Fund picked up a general support grant of$450,000 from Carnegie in the year 2000. Executive Director John Echohawk is on the Board of Directors of the Natural Resources Defense Council.[71] NARF proudly participated in the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, in September 2001. At this conference, attendees – led by the Arab states – attacked the United States and Israel holding them responsible for global racism and “xenophobia.” The conference reached high farce when Fidel Castro thundered the United States should pay reparations to American blacks.[72] In fact Cuba had more African slaves than the entire North American continent, and at this very moment its own citizens are not free. The conference made the United States and Britain – and Europeans generally – responsible for the slave trade, ignoring the much larger Muslim slave trade to the east, and turning a blind eye to the hundreds of thousands of black Africans currently enslaved in Muslim Sudan, Mauritania or Eritrea.[73]Jewish attendees of the conference were spat upon, beaten and summarily dismissed from its hearings.[74] Proceedings reached such levels of anti-Americanism that the U.S. delegation left (except for Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who later alleged President Bush had advance knowledge of 9/11).[75] The Native American Rights Fund was a participant in the proceedings, courtesy of Carnegie.

In addition to demanding reparations from the United States and Britain, NARF has challenged Alaska’s English-Only Law and “filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the cancellation of the pro-football Washington ‘Redskins’ trademark.”[76]

Public Broadcasters

Teresa Heinz Kerry has made numerous grants to underwrite public television’s political programming. She has donated $8.2 million to WQED, Pittsburgh, a sizable chunk of which was designated “for public affairs” programming. This is but the largest budget item for the Heinz Endowment’s financing of public broadcasting’s news programming – much of it pushing a Green agenda. Other examples include:

$200,000 to Persephone Productions, Inc., “for production of four field pieces on various topics on the [very liberal] PBS television program ‘To the Contrary.’”

$370,000 to the Pittsburgh Community Broadcasting Corp. for the production of the “Allegheny Front,” an environmentalist radio program.

$100,000 to the Public Broadcasting System “for the Reaching Accord project.”

$250,000 to the liberal Public Radio International for coverage of environment, women’s issues and economic security issues on “The World.”

$540,000 to National Public Radio from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

$10,000 to the Population Communication International Inc., “for distribution of the People Count broadcasts,” another environmentalist propaganda outlet.

$5,000 to the Population Media Center (run by Turner Broadcasting), also “for the People Count project.”

These media grants have put money into the hands of fellow leftists. A portion of a larger Heinz grant to the Mon Valley Media was designated to produce the video “Terminal Time.” One of the film’s three co-producers is Michael Mateas of Carnegie Mellon University. In his incomprehensible description of his film, Mateas found numerous occasions to quote Lenin, and to praise the Soviet dictatorship (not his term) for the “strong political support given to filmmakers in particular.”[77] (Those they didn’t support, they shot.) The second co-producer, Steffi Domike, is a lecturer in the Communications Department at Pittsburgh’s Chatham College. The key essay on Ms. Domike’s website is entitled “The Work of (Activist) Art in an Age of Empire.”[78] In it, she reveals that as a young person in Chile, she supported the pro-Castro Marxist Salvador Allende and continues to support “Latin American land reform.” Later, in her own words, she “chose to work here in the U.S., in what activists in the 1960s called the ‘belly of the beast.’” Her work, she writes, includes everything from “revolutionary polemics to rank and file organizing, from television propaganda to tactical media practice and performance.” She also works with a “cyberfeminist” organization.[79] Paul Vanouse, the third co-producer of “Terminal Time,” is Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Buffalo. His portfolio includes such “artwork” as the “Follower” video game, in which the player must kill on command. This “hyperbolic video game…questions the heroic portrayal of authoritarian violence in American pop culture, and the methods of first-world military operations in the post-Vietnam era.”[80]

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